08oct18

A Saudi women’s rights activist was driving in the United Arab Emirates when she was pulled
over by security officers, thrown on a plane to Saudi Arabia and jailed.

In Canada, when a Saudi student refused to stop making YouTube videos criticizing the
kingdom’s rulers, two of his brothers back home were imprisoned.

So when a prominent Saudi critic, Jamal Khashoggi, disappeared after entering the Saudi
Consulate in Istanbul last week, it hardly surprised Saudi dissidents living abroad — until
Turkish officials said they believed he had been killed.

Even for a country that has long used fear and enticements to control dissent, the prospect that
the state had killed a well-known dissident writer in a foreign country represented a startling
escalation.

As Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has pushed his vision for modernizing Saudi Arabia,
he has increasingly shown little tolerance for criticism. He has jailed women’s rights activists,
locked up businessmen and rival royals, and has reached across borders to keep Saudi expatriates
in line, significantly raising the stakes of speaking out, even in foreign countries.

It remains unclear what happened to Mr. Khashoggi, who has not been seen since he entered the
consulate last Tuesday. Turkish officials say he was killed by Saudi agents there and his body
dismembered. Saudi officials deny it, saying Mr. Khashoggi left the consulate soon after he
arrived.

But Saudi dissidents abroad have little doubt that their government targeted Mr. Khashoggi
because of his prominence. A resident of the United States, he regularly appeared on television
and contributed columns to The Washington Post.

“It’s a message, very clear, that our hands can reach you wherever you are,” said Ghanem
al-Dosary, a longtime dissident in London who has a large social media following.

If Saudi agents are found to have killed Mr. Khashoggi, the reverberations could sabotage Saudi
Arabia’s international relations, starting with its neighbor Turkey.

On Monday, Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, demanded that the Saudis prove their
claim that Mr. Khashoggi, who went to the consulate to pick up documents he needed to get
married, had left the consulate.

“If he left, you have to prove it with footage,” Mr. Erdogan said at a news conference in
Budapest, according to the semiofficial Anadolu news agency.

Mr. Khashoggi’s death could also undermine Saudi relations with the Trump administration,
which has built close ties with the Saudi leadership.

“I am concerned about it,” President Trump told reporters on Monday. “I don’t like hearing about
it. Hopefully that will sort itself out. Right now nobody knows anything about it, but there’s
some pretty bad stories going around. I do not like it.”

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo called on the Saudi government “to support a thorough
investigation of Mr. Khashoggi’s disappearance and to be transparent about the results of that
investigation.”

Crown Prince Mohammed, 33, the kingdom’s day-to-day ruler, has pushed to liberalize Saudi
society by letting women drive, weakening the once-powerful religious police and expanding
entertainment opportunities by allowing concerts and movie theaters. But those reforms have
come with a stronger authoritarian hand that has tried to silence critics at home and abroad.

Many Saudi dissidents living abroad have already felt government pressure.

Some have lost government scholarships. Others have been enticed to return home, only to be
arrested or threated if they didn’t keep quiet. Some have had their relatives arrested or barred
from traveling. A number said they now avoided other Saudis abroad for fear of spies, and didn’t
travel through other Arab countries, afraid that they could be nabbed and shipped home.

“They don’t care if you are famous, if you have a big following or not,” said the dissident in
Canada, Omar Abdulaziz. “’If you criticize us even a little bit, we are going to go after you.’”

The dissidents represent no monolithic organized opposition but are instead a smattering of
activists, writers and social media personalities of various stripes who speak out about an array of
issues. They range from those calling for toppling the monarchy to those who want more freedom
inside the current system.

Loujain al-Hathloul, an outspoken women’s rights activist, made her name in 2014 when she was
jailed for 73 days for trying to drive her car into Saudi Arabia from the United Arab Emirates,
where she was living.

The government tried many times after that to silence her, arresting or interrogating her, her
friends said. But in March, cars full of security officers stopped her on the highway in the United
Arab Emirates, where she was studying for a master’s degree. They handcuffed her, drove her to
the airport and threw her onto a private jet to Saudi Arabia, where she was jailed for a few days.

Her husband, Fahad al-Butairi, a well-known Saudi actor and comedian, was acting in a project
in Jordan. Security officers arrested him there. He was handcuffed, blindfolded and put onto a
plane for Saudi Arabia, according to the couple’s friends.

“It is like you are not immune,” Manal al-Sherif, an activist and friend of the couple, said by
telephone from Australia, where she now lives. “You can be arrested anywhere and deported
forcefully.”

After her release, Ms. Hathloul kept a low profile, until armed security officers stormed her home
in May and arrested her as part of a wave of arrests of women who had campaigned for the right
to drive. Most are still detained, and it is unclear whether they have been formally charged with
any crime.

Ms. Hathloul’s marriage ended, and Mr. Butairi deleted his Twitter account, where his bio had
declared him her proud husband. In July, she turned 29 in prison.

“They wanted to break her because she is a very strong woman,” Ms. Sherif said.

The Saudi government did not respond to a request for comment about its efforts to silence
dissidents abroad.

But in an interview with Bloomberg last week, Crown Prince Mohammed said that some of the
women arrested had been leaking information about the kingdom to the intelligence agencies of
Qatar and Iran, both considered enemies of the kingdom.

He said that change in Saudi Arabia would not come without “a price,” just as ending slavery in
the United States did not come with a violent civil war.

“Here we are trying to get rid of extremism and terrorism without civil war, without stopping the
country from growing, with continuous progress in all elements,” he said. “So if there is a small
price in that area, it’s better than paying a big debt to do that move.” He added: “We’re trying to
be sure that no one is harmed as much as we can.”

The kingdom wielded different techniques against Mr. Abdulaziz, the dissident in Canada. After
he started criticizing the kingdom’s leaders on social media as a university student, his
government scholarship was canceled, he said. He was told to return to the kingdom to sort out
the problem, but he applied for political asylum instead, getting it in 2014.

Since then, he has built a large audience for YouTube videos in which he makes fun of the
kingdom’s leadership and criticizes its human rights record.

Representatives of the Saudi government have tried to get him to shut down his videos and return
to the kingdom, he said, but when he refused, two of his brothers and a number of his friends in
Saudi Arabia were arrested.

In August, researchers at Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto concluded that hackers
working for Saudi Arabia had infiltrated his cellphone using software purchased from an Israeli
company.

A report by Citizen Lab said the hackers would have had access to his “contacts, private family
photos, text messages and live voice calls from popular mobile messaging apps.” They also could
have activated his camera and microphone to intercept conversations and other activities.

Mr. Abdulaziz, 27, was surprised at how far the government was going to silence him.

“Yes, I was criticizing the regime,” he said. “We were looking for freedom of speech, we were
looking for human rights. But reaching out to the families of dissidents, hacking their phones,
kidnapping journalists — this is crazy.”

“I am just a guy with a Twitter account and a YouTube channel,” he added. “So why is MBS, one
of the most powerful men in the world, scared of me?”

[Source: By Ben Hubbard, The New York Times, Beirut, 08Oct18]

This document has been published on 10Oct18 by the Equipo Nizkor and Derechos Human Rights. In accordance with
Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a
prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational
purposes.